WrestleTalk Live At The Prince Charles: The History Of Ready To Rumble

Ohhhhhh SWAFT NATION! Don’t you dare…make plans on May 7 because the Prince Charles Cinema in Leicester Square, London is the place to be!

Following the great success of our first visit to the Prince Charles Cinema in London in November 2018 to screen Beyond the Mat, Luke, Oli, Laurie, Randy and Pete are heading back for another dose of cinematic goodness!

For those of you who might not know why the film was made, we’ve prepared this short history lesson for you.

If you ignore the fact that Ready to Rumble scored a magnificent 23% on Rotten Tomatoes, and the nicest thing anyone had to say was “We feel dirty, but we liked it,” then you can really start to appreciate it for what it was…a ludicrous concept executed to about 40% perfection, and that’s all you need for a fun afternoon.

While watching the film, you may find yourself asking “why?” a lot, but we’re going to delve a bit deeper into exactly WHY the film was created in the first place.

Although it may be hard for some fans to believe, WWE/WWF hasn’t always been the dominant force in wrestling, and for much of the 1990s, which if you ask a lot of wrestling fans is when wrestling peaked, WCW was on top. They had the biggest stars, the better storylines and most importantly, a name that didn’t have the same acronym as a world renowned wildlife charity.

1999 and the WWF is slowly tightening its chokehold on all of its competition. The Monday night wars had been raging for four years at this point, with WWF’s Raw taking on WCW’s Nitro for supremacy of prime time wrestling weekly wrestling shows, you know, the most important thing in the universe.

It was becoming clear to fans that, as is generally the case in these situations, that the bigger, more evil overlord Vince McMahon was going to come out of top thanks largely to the introduction of the attitude era in 1997. WCW’s founder Ted Turner was heading into financial trouble and the promotion was beginning to run out of ideas.

WCW needed to pull a rabbit out of its ever shrinking hat and what better way to do that than by using the magic of the big screen to increase the mainstream appeal of the promotion. On the face of it, this was a pretty good idea, as we’ve seen in the past 20 years, appealing to the mainstream media is something wrestling has increasingly tried to do.

And who better to bring in mainstream appeal than real life wrestling fanatic and star of Scream (and Scream 2) David Arquette. Arquette plays Gordie Boggs in the film, drawing from his experience as a wrestling fan to play a wrestling fan, method acting is a huge part of this film as you will see.

It helped that he was also dating Courtney Cox at the time, who was starring in arguably the most famous sitcom of all time, Friends. It seemed that having Arquette in the film would be a sure fire way of making it a success, and throw in Bill Goldberg, Diamond Dallas Page, Sting, Rey Mysterio, Randy Savage, Gene Okerlund, Mr Perfect, Bam Bam Bigelow, Sid Vicious…how could it possibly go wrong?

You can’t really blame them for trying either, the film could have been great, all it needed was a better plot, better production, more talented actors and then it could have done everything WCW wanted it to do.

Unfortunately for WCW, critics, on the whole at least, hated it, and labelled it as an insult to wrestling and to comedy, which for a wrestling comedy film is a bit of a disaster.

For your ticket, just click right here and then click on the time in the top right.

• David Arquette
• WCW
• Ready To Rumble
• wrestletalk

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